British manager the only solution

Sunday 25 November 2007 18.16 EST
First published on Sunday 25 November 2007 18.16 EST

Even now, even after spurning not one but two lucky reprieves on Wednesday to go out of a tournament by conceding three goals at home to a team with nothing in particular to play for, you would not be totally surprised were an England player to surface in the next few weeks with the opinion that if only qualification had been gained the team might have gone all the way in the European Championship.

When all the available evidence points so strongly in the opposite direction, we think we are such a big footballing country with such talented players that merely appointing the right coach would quickly see us soaring back where we belong. Jose Mourinho, Fabio Capello, Arsene Wenger and even Jurgen Klinsmann are all being mentioned. Luiz Felipe Scolari and Guus Hiddink have receded somewhat in the betting, partly because their own qualification campaigns were not that great and partly because they will be occupied until summer at least.

'Unbelievably arrogant,' was Manchester City's Croatian defender Vedran Corluka's summary of the English condition, and it is hard not to agree. No sooner had Israel gifted England a get-out-of-jail card they scarcely deserved than Peter Crouch was talking up the possibility of winning the tournament. While still praying for a miracle in Tel Aviv, Steve McClaren actually suggested that if England were handed a lifeline the game against Croatia at Wembley would 'take care of itself'. Yet Croatia, as Corluka acidly pointed out, came to Wembley top of the group. The lack of respect they received from England provided their main motivation, very much to England's cost.

It was not just McClaren's dismally parochial outlook or the childish booing of the Croatian anthem at Wembley, it was the reaction of the English media to the initial defeat in Zagreb, when it was almost universally suggested that Slaven Bilic did not possess a single player capable of getting into the England team. 'Wake up, gentlemen,' was Bilic's politely restrained message in the Wembley press room after trouncing England even more convincingly a second time. Not being a manager, Corluka saw no need to tread as carefully. 'We've shown again that we are a better team and it's a real pleasure to kick England out of the European Championship.'

That is how the rest of the world sees us and the rest of the world will now watch with amusement as we try to find a manager worthy enough to meet our high ideals. The gap between how anyone perceives themselves and how they are viewed by others is often amusing, sometimes in these very circumstances. A few years ago a vox pop of Sunderland fans about who should be their new manager produced names such as Johan Cruyff, Marcello Lippi and George Graham. They ended up with Howard Wilkinson and Steve Cotterill.

In addition to being monumentally arrogant, England are staggeringly unoriginal in these matters, too. Never mind the usual suspects, the name staring them in the face is that of Bilic. He spent a good while playing here, something few of the other foreign candidates can say, has proved himself in international management quickly and has a perfect head-to-head record against England. He is not ideal FA material in that he smokes, drinks and is more of an outspoken maverick than Brian Clough would ever have been, yet in his favour he is young, relatively cheap and keen on England.

So if England are looking for a foreign coach they should put in a call to Zagreb right now and, bearing in mind the Scolari fiasco last year, keep everything under their hat until after the finals. Bilic may not be the best coach around but he knocks spots off McClaren, has put Hiddink in the shade and is certainly good enough for England. If nothing else, we would be in for an entertaining few years.

I still remember interviewing him at Everton 10 years ago, when he decided against a chat at the training ground and drove a couple of us instead to a local pub, where he insisted on buying beer and cigarettes for the party before sitting down to talk. McClaren never did that once, even after dragging the nation's football scribes to North Yorkshire for press conferences in his home village of Yarm. Which is a lovely place, by the way. There must have been some other reason why the words 'No more Yarm' were practically being sung in chorus in the press areas at Wembley on Wednesday.

There is only one flaw in the Bilic plan and it is quite a big one. England, at this juncture, should not be looking for a foreign coach. If we have any pride as a football nation we should be responding to the humiliation of Wednesday by reinventing and reinvigorating ourselves, not hiring someone from abroad to do it. It is debatable, anyway, whether one man can really make a difference when the pool of players is so small and so many of them are always injured.

But importing success is what we do in the Premier League. England may have the richest and most entertaining league in the world, yet increasingly we are seen merely as hosts to that competition. We have all the conditions for commercial viability in this country but the Premier League is a league in England, in no sense is it an English league. Unless we want to be seen simply as an attractive venue, like Wimbledon for tennis, we cannot afford to franchise out the England team as well.

Were the Premier League more of an indigenous source of pride, pulling in viewers while still producing healthy crops of young English players and managers of the future, then there would be no harm whatsoever in importing ideas and guidance. It is often forgotten in football discussions that we are an island race, with all the detachment, resistance to change and, yes, insularity that implies. We are bound to be less receptive to new ideas than the rest of Europe; our whole culture is one of sticking to what we know and doing what we always have done. English football could exist for centuries without ever producing a manager in the mould of Mourinho or Wenger, just as our teams could happily play from here to eternity without seeing the need to change from 4-4-2.

Like it or not, the archetypical English manager is Sam Allardyce. A friend with a child involved in youth football at the moment reports that week in, week out, on park pitches all over the country, the players of tomorrow are being supervised by morose, shouty types with big coats and a gruff manner who play big lads at the back and at the front and like to keep things as simple as possible in between. Grassroots football in England produces Allardyce clones by the dozen. We seem genetically incapable of even imitating anything more stylish or original.

That is, of course, an excellent reason for importing foreign talent, freshness and thinking into our well loved and somewhat fossilised game. And we have. The Premier League is full of it. It is a long time since any of the top-four clubs looked to England for a manager, Arsenal regularly play without any English input, and even mid-ranking clubs can boast only a handful of local players. It could be said that the Premier League is at saturation point with imports, which is exactly why the national team must remain an expression of English ability. It may not be a shortcut to success, but appointing another English coach is simply the right thing to do. That would not necessarily exclude Martin O'Neill, or even Sir Alex Ferguson or Mark Hughes. They are all products of English football - Fergie's 21 years at Manchester United is exactly the same length of time Alf Ramsey and Bobby Robson spent at Ipswich between them - and though pedants may argue about birthplaces, what is important now is for English football to be seen to be replenishing itself.

McClaren was not the best of the British candidates last time, so his failure does not necessarily mean the cupboard is bare. Neither should the FA hawk the job around Europe when there are pressing problems at home. Chief of those is that not enough good players are being produced. Second is that English football has lost all confidence in its own ability. If the Germans had a brainwave with Klinsmann, then what we should do is not go for Klinsmann ourselves, but have a brainwave of our own. Come on down, Teddy Sheringham! Or Tony Adams. Or Harry Redknapp. Anyone, really, just to show that we have some ideas left. And some guts.